Thursday, September 30, 2010

I want to go to college

By: Michael Lenoch

I want my college decision to be a good one,

For this life-changing choice to be made with a degree of seriousness,

I will therefore decide on a number of principles and ideals;

I want a challenge,

I want the average student to be more intelligent than me,

I want to grow, and learn from my peers,

I want to be social, and on the same level as my peers,

I want to progress myself,

I want to use my peers to build my horizons, and wish they do the same to me,

I want to strive to be better, continually,

I want to propel myself, ever thirsty for more knowledge; hungry for more answers,

I want to establish a degree of camaraderie,

I want an environment that supports both play and study,

I want to get along, be a part, be someone’s friend,

I want to challenge my mind and body; mentally and physically,

I want to join clubs, intramurals, and possibly sports,

I want to be involved in the community,

I want to attend mass as a group regularly,

I want friends who support me for doing so, and accept me for who I am,

I want to be greeted by smiles, and to smile back,

I want lazy days with hot chocolate in the winter, and I want vibrant summer days in which we all go outside and play,

I want to be comfortable, but more often than not, uncomfortable, forced to grow,

I want programs that interest me, and ones that can further shape me as a person,

I want classes that deepen my ability to analyze,

To write, and think,

I want to go to college.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Psychological Tidbit

In the same way we are instructed to re-think the way we define the parameters by which individuals are defined as "disabled", or "sick", or "different", we should assign equal emphasis in promoting the effort of re-defining our fundamental understanding of intelligence. College professors and educators in higher forms of learning tend to be rather rigid in their definition of "intelligence", and should therefore be responsible for the widening of the modern child's currently consolidated imagination and level of creativity. Intelligence refers to one's ability to think in a multitude of conditions, to draw connections from one object to another, and to always be steadfastly thirsty for knowledge.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Average Sunday Afternoon

While Jessica types until her bone wears away, I feel a sense of jealously coming on, and decide to write something for my blog. Jessica chats over the phone with my father, stressing about her homework to no end as I indulge in a therapeutic web surf, consuming all the media I missed out on during the arduous schoolweek. I act this way almost as if to completely contradict Jessica’s hive-minded, horse-blinders, lab-mouse mentality, so I can step back and laugh at her ridiculously intense level scrupulousness. I do this though, at the risk of my reputation to her and my potential bed time. See by not investing myself at every minute of every possible morsel of free time, I can appear, although maybe only marginally, lazy. But I don’t care. Also, by expending as little energy as possible by procrastinating and not doing my homework until the last minutes of Sunday’s schoolnight, I risk going to bed at a significantly later time, if not date, however less significantly for the latter. While writing this, I contemplate the fact that I had slept for a good two hours or so prior to this writing. I say “Hmm” to my self, not fazed one bit. I look over as Jessica checks Facebook. Not as scrupulous as I once suspected, sister. The truth comes out! I uncharacteristically turn up my iTunes volume level to compensate for her IQ-depleting talk with friend, Grace. I move on, and groove out.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Alas! I Return for Yet Another Critique!

It's been sometime, and I have even gone on the record for saying that I would pursue to create my own website as opposed to reverting to this mere blog. Yet such a task still has not been completed.

So I come to you, loyal fans, with a brief critique: YouTube. It is home to countless morons, hedons, and downright less-than-scrupulous people. With usernames including symbolistic digits such as, "420", or "69", the comments on the video sharing website are inevitably and unavoidably negative. Always claiming one music artist is superior to another, or divulging into irrelevant and uncalled for political, societal, and racist debate and commentary, YouTube commentors are a violent breed.

As is true with all forms of art, there is absolutely no way to please all potential consumers of a given art form, other than to not bother with creating the art in the first place, and letting people get on with their needlessly and perpetually busy lifestyles. So in short, there is no ubiquitous pleasing of the entire volatile YouTube community. We know for certain that there will always be people there to tell you that you suck, you "fail", you "fail at life", or to more shamelessly, to go "kill yourself". I feel YouTube embodies a virtual space for anonymous public commentary.

Early in the world wide web's infancy, there were charming, little forums in which nearly every member would take the time to explain a detail or a solution to a problem in ostensibly any given hobby's respective message board. Back then, web users never heard of "griefing", or the act of making another user's experience less than ideal, whether that means it takes place in the form of negative comments, "thumbs" down, poor reviews, or other types of internet user-to-user sabotage. Today, whether you're aware of it or not, this is an unfortunate reality of the average person's anonymous internet behavior. It's nigh impossible to join a web forum today without at least at some point encountering a jerk, never receiving a negative comment review, or a "thumbs down" in one form or another.

So, this begs the question, why do people behave this way? Simply put, it's the sense of anonymity the average internet user feels when he or she leaves a comment. Theoretically, a user can leave the deepest, most scarring insult on a contributor's YouTube video, and forget that he or she even did so. When we make verbal mistakes in person, though, even slight name mess-ups, we remember them for weeks afterward. It's clear people perceive the internet as a netherland, a virtual place where nothing so much matters, because anything can happen. Hypothetically, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo, and any other major website could all crash by the skill of a single hacker, and the quickness of his or her mouse. Anything can happen on this internet, and for the most part, the unexpected happens.